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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (Image via Wikipedia)

This is an extraordinary time in the business-technology world as customers are being given a wide range of new and distinctive strategic approaches to evaluate, and as technology vendors are rushing to deliver not only new generations of products but even radically different long-term philosophies.

We’ll hear much more in the months to come about open environments versus closed, and what the definition of “open” is; about in-memory computing and its potential; about the significant shift of precious IT budgets away from more-of-the-same infrastructure and toward value-rich software solutions; about real-time visibility and execution; about the stunningly rapid shift among many companies to a mobile-first and mobile-everywhere strategy; and about the ongoing upheaval these changes are creating for business models and business strategies.

In the wake of Oracle’s introduction of a sweeping range of new products, a couple of astute industry experts have analyzed Oracle’s evolving strategies, technologies, and perspectives. From their work, I’ve extracted 10 questions for Oracle and Larry Ellison that touch on many of those disruptive trends mentioned above.

The industry experts who did all the real work from which I’ve drawn the 10 questions Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting and John Appleby of Bluefin Solutions. With thanks and credit to Josh and John, here’s that list of 10 intriguing questions about Oracle.

1)“Why is Oracle afraid of SAP?," Appleby asks in a recent blog post. "Oracle have no need to build this appliance [Exalytics]. It’s architecturally complex and they would make more money out of selling the premium Exadata appliance. So why did they? For my money, because Larry wanted to show SAP that he could also build an in-memory analytics appliance in a short period of time. And this shows for the first time – in the wider market context – that Oracle might be afraid that SAP’s strategy of in-memory computing with its HANA appliance, is the right strategy.”

2)What caused Larry’s Ellison’s about-face regarding the feasibility of in-memory computing? Appleby says: “First, Oracle’s Ellison publicly dismissed in-memory computing just 6 months ago. He claimed SAP were on drugs, building out an in-memory database, as referenced in this PC World article: “Get me the name of their pharmacist,” Ellison said at the time. “I mean, I know a lot about in-memory databases. In fact, we have the leading in-memory database, TimesTen. This is nonsense. There is no in-memory technology anywhere near ready to take the place of a relational database. It’s a complete fantasy on their part.” ”

3)Does Larry Ellison understand the level of complexity Oracle’s customers face in trying to integrate the vast range of diverse Oracle applications? Says Greenbaum: “Compounding the irony is that, despite Larry’s insistence – could he be that out of touch with his customers that he believes this? – that integrating his software stack is easy, the reality is that integration is hard, expensive, and, most ironic of all, the responsibility of the customer, not Oracle. There is no magic bullet, no easy-to-configure wizard, for the majority of the integration that Oracle customers require to run their businesses on Oracle software. Nope, it’s all about custom development, using expensive development resources. Sure, there are more and more “integrations” being built by Oracle, and more all the time. And as long as time is not of the essence, one day Oracle will have filled out the massive matrix of integrations required to link hundreds of key business processes across dozens of often overlapping applications. One day.”

4)Will the simultaneous rollout of Fusion Apps and another new Exa machines persuade customers to spend more with Oracle? Says Greenbaum: “Interestingly, I spent much of Open World button-holing applications customers and asking them if they were planning on upgrading to the Exadata/logic/lytics strategy. The answer was universal – not now. When I asked them why, it was because they couldn’t see the value in such a migration, not when they were up to their eyeballs upgrading and integrating their apps. And when I asked them when they might consider such a move, the answer boiled down to the following: when Oracle gives me a clear ROI strategy for migrating that I can take to the board. And when I asked Oracle for evidence of this strategy, the answer was simple, there is none. One Oracle exec whom I asked did discuss an ROI strategy, but his answer was basically about the ROI for Oracle. (Sound bite: running on Exadata lowers Oracle’s support costs. Translation: investors get even better margins.) And while I was promised that this ROI strategy would be revealed to me when it was available, I’m not holding my breath.”

6)How does Oracle balance its regard for its customers with its regard for its investors?Says Greenbaum: “The problem with the Oracle of today is that the focus of a group of some of the best technology minds in the industry has been hijacked to fulfill a vision that is skewed more towards fulfilling the promise of a decade-old merger and acquisition strategy than it is towards making customers both successful and happy. And the vision comes with a built-in irony that has me convinced that the customer comes second at Oracle, second to the shareholders whose addiction to Oracle’s margins has driven the executive team at Oracle to consider investors, not actual companies that consume its software, as the real customers.”

7)Will Oracle follow SAP’s in-memory approach? Appleby, noting that “SAP HANA is a simple and elegant solution” even though the entire product set is “not quite there today,” contrasts HANA’s high-value potential with what he says is a very different value proposition presented by Oracle’s newest machine: “Exalytics on the other hand is a bolt-on mixed-technology appliance. For Oracle to really compete with SAP, they need to throw out Exadata and Exalytics and build an in-memory RDBMS appliance that can do what both of those appliances do in one. They have the brains to do so – but will they? We will see.”

8)Will Oracle deliver app-integration tools to its customers, or is that a responsibility that customers should manage themselves? Says Greenbaum: “This disconnect, this dystopic vision, becomes even more ironic when you add Fusion Apps to the mix. Here’s a new suite that has to be sold in parts to customers using other, older parts of the Oracle product mix because selling it as a suite would expose its severe limitations in terms of industry-specific functionality. With integration as the starting point, you’d think Oracle would engineer the integration between Fusion Apps and the key products in the suite to be a no-brainer for the customers. Wrong. Coders, start your engines: Oracle Fusion Apps require the customer to do the majority of the integration work in order to make the products work with the rest of the Oracle stack. Sure, they are building the integration points – there are 10 or 15 available today as Fusion goes GA – but how that piecemeal approach to the core requirement of integration helps control customer costs and deliver customer value is beyond me.”

9)For the investor community, how important are Oracle’s hardware sales and hardware margins? Says Greenbaum: “Because in the end Oracle’s roll-up [of] the best of breed strategy has never been about better TCO for the customers. It’s been about optimizing the sales opportunity for Oracle’s incredibly effective sales machine, while bringing smaller, inefficient software companies under the razor-sharp cost-cutting eye of Safra Catz. There is certainly a fair amount of consideration about customer choice in the strategy as well – they have many truly best of breed apps in the portfolio – but that has increasingly fallen prey to the requirement for delivering more red meat – in the form of profit margins – to an extremely avaricious investor community hell-bent on looking out for number one. That hunt for profit margins is now all the more acute because of the strain that the Sun acquisition has put on those margins. Safra Catz is now on the record for two quarters promising that the company will soon get back to its former, pre-Sun, margin glory, with little specific guidance on when that will actually happen. Hence the real focus of Open World, which was one big, fat commercial for Exa-everything. Sure, there were plenty of keynotes about things like clouds and apps, but there was no mistaking what Larry was really selling: engineered hardware systems. And there is no mistaking the almost frantic urgency in the subtext to that message: we won’t make good on our promise to Wall Street if the customers don’t start buying more hardware.”

10)“Where does this all lead?," asks Greenbaum. "There are definitely apps customers who could benefit from engineered systems, but I think a more agnostic, customer-choice hardware model fits the needs of modern businesses best. Meanwhile, Oracle’s acquisition of best of breed vendors will run into a more rapidly shifting mobility-based user experience revolution that is already under way, and already making new user experiences like those in Fusion Apps look old and tired by comparison.”

Finally, because this is such an important subject, here’s a bonus question:

11)Does Oracle foster open information exchanges with influencers and customers? Says Greenbaum: “The four or so events Oracle’s competitors hold each year include multiple opportunities to put influencers in front of the execs and get the dialogue going. In doing so, most of Oracle’s competitors believe – or at least pay lip service to – the notion that they learn from the dialogue as much as the influencers. Oracle, with so much to learn, thinks otherwise…. Could this be the real purpose of Open World: listen to the story we want to tell and don’t expect us to leave time or energy for dialogue? Take the information we want to give you and to hell with the information you think you need to know?”